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Liver and kidney tumours are among the most common and fatal abdominal cancers, posing a substantial threat to both life and quality of living. Image-guided minimally invasive percutaneous interventions, including biopsy and ablation, have become effective and popular diagnostic and therapeutic approaches due to significant advantages such as greatly reducing perioperative complications and recovery time 1. In conventional interventions, surgeons navigate needle probes to lesions guided by medical imaging techniques such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Ultrasound (US) Imaging. However, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) guidance is also of significant interest for this clinical application as it can deliver enhanced soft tissue contrast, allowing surgeons to outline tumour margins precisely for effective ablation while also offering multi-angle imaging and intraoperative monitoring of the tissues 2. However, several challenges persist in MRI-guided interventions. Patients typically undergo multiple movements in and out of the scanning bore to enable the clinician to achieve precise needle insertion, resulting in time- consuming procedures. Furthermore, the confined space within the MRI scanning bore and the accompanying noise levels further increase the complexity of these procedures. With the advancement of robotics, MRI- guided needle insertion robots have the potential to tackle these challenges. To align with the application demands, the materials employed in such robots should be non-conductive, non-metallic, etc., according to the MR safe requirements 3, and the robot should be optimally designed to minimise its spatial footprint when placed inside the MRI bore, ensuring that it does not pose an impediment for the standard operation of the MRI scan. While several MRI-compatible robotic systems have been proposed 4, challenges still remain in terms of workspace optimisation of these robotic systems. In this work, a five-degree-of-freedom (DoF) table-mounted parallel MR safe robot is proposed.
Liang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.